Development Tools

To develop your JCR, Apache Sling or AEM applications, the following tool sets are available:

one set consisting of CRXDE Lite and WebDAV. CRXDE Lite is embedded into CRX/AEM and enables you to perform standard development tasks in the browser. With CRXDE Lite, you can create and edit files (like .jsp and .java), folders, templates, components, dialogs, nodes, propertiesand bundles while logging and integrating with SVN.
CRXDE Lite is recommended when you do not have direct access to the CRX/AEM server, when you develop an application by extending or modifying the out-of-the-box components and Java bundles or when you do not need a dedicated debugger, code completion and syntax hightlighting.

one set consisting of an Integrated Development Environment (for example: Eclipse or IntelliJ), a build tool (for example: Apache Maven), FileVault which has been developed by Adobe to map a repository to a file system, a version control system (for example: Subversion), a bug tracker system (for example: Jira), a central dependency management system (for example: Apache Archiva) and a build automation system (for example: Apache Continuum).
This setup allows you to fully integrate your application (content, code, configuration) into any development environment and process.The link between the different elements is the file system representation of the repository through FileVault, as all of the aforementioned development tools can work with files.